Bands "graduate," in a way, at Newport Folk: It's not uncommon for an act to be booked for one of the festival's smaller stages, only to have their popularity spike with a lucrative album release and a coveted main-stage spot the following year. This has been the case for the The Avett Brothers, who headlined the Newport Folk Festival Saturday night. Since showing up with little more than a guitar, a banjo, a solo kick-drum, and an upright bass for their first set at Newport Folk, the Avett operation has brought in more members and an elaborate stage setup that now includes strings, a piano, and a drum kit in full. Songs off I and Love and You, their major-label debut and the record that took them from a niche genre to mainstream success, received a proper introduction with an eager crowd at the big stage at Newport Folk in 2009. "Down with the Shine" from last year's universally lauded The Carpenter was played for the first time on the Newport Folk stage two months prior to the record's release. Though material from the yet-to-be-titled Avett Brothers record dropping early this fall didn't make its way into their headlining set this year, Scott Avett, Seth Avett, Bob Crawford, and Joe Kwon joined us backstage for a stripped-down performance of the never-before-heard "Morning Song" before talking to us about the new stuff, the old stuff, and where exactly they've gone — and continue to go — from this fort right here.

ESQUIRE.COM: How have things changed for you since the first time you played the Newport Folk Festival?

SCOTT AVETT: With Newport, I was saying to Bob, "We can't build it up to be more than something it already is." There's been tough shows here sometimes, but we've actually had a great show every time we've been here.

SETH AVETT: As soon as you get here, any intimidation factor just completely washes away. It's just a bunch of smiling faces. It's a friendly atmosphere where you don't feel like you have to live up to any legend, because there's no one here vocalizing any intimidation in any way.

BOB CRAWFORD: Something that's always struck me about Newport is that the history is very present wherever you go. You see pictures of Pete Seeger and Joan Baez around, but the festival isn't hung up on its history — it's proud of it. I remember seeing the David Wax Museum right outside there at that tent bringing down the house, as though that were their big coming-out here, as did Calexico. Newport Folk just seems like it continues to be relevant.

ESQ: Do you prefer to play outdoor festivals like this? What's the perfect venue for an Avett Brothers show?

SCOTT AVETT: I don't think we can make speculations about how shows will be based on the setting. I was just thinking in terms of what Seth was saying — over the years we've had this realization about how privileged we are to be onstage. Some nights, you have the urge to complain about something. In settings like this, these open-air beautiful settings, it's not as hard to remember that you've been offered this opportunity for whatever reason.

ESQ: So, which Avett Brothers song is a song most appropriate for a dive bar?

SCOTT AVETT: "Yardsale" seems to be a most appropriate song for that kind of place.

SETH AVETT: I like when we do a gospel song in a dive bar. It does this weird thing where some folks have an averse reaction to it — "Is this the place for that?" — while some folks are like, "This is the perfect place for that!" It's always fun to sing those there. Or in a casino.

SCOTT AVETT: Yeah, in a casino, too. You can always make that juxtaposition happen.

ESQ: A song like "If It's the Beaches," where you're begging for the woman you love to reconsider leaving you — I like when you perform that in front of a bigger crowd, mostly because we feel like we're being let in on something we don't already know.

SCOTT AVETT: We keep songs under our belt now longer than we used to. We used to literally finish a song and play it that night.

SETH AVETT: We wouldn't think twice about it. We know now that that's not appropriate to our ages and our professional interest.

SCOTT AVETT: It's not best for the songs, because we've learned that they take longer to develop. It could have a great melody and be produced well and really get you dancing, but a good, lyrical song that's torn open and exposed? That was very important to me. I think we have to be realistic about how much we want to expose. If you have a child involved, you want to protect that child. That's your job.

ESQ: I'm sure parenthood has changed a lot about what you do. And hey, these songs are like children in a way — they're a legacy you're leaving.

SCOTT AVETT: Yeah, those songs aren't your children anymore because you have children. They take a backseat to the children, and that's bizarre. I've done art talks where I've told a room full of parents that my paintings were as important as a child, and that was the biggest mound of horse shit I've ever said in my entire life. I remember offending someone, and someone defending what I said, and I just didn't know what I was talking about!

ESQ: Over the years, you've made some changes in your live show beyond lineup additions and instrumentation. What sorts of changes make your 2013 set different than previous performances at Newport Folk?

BOB CRAWFORD: Scott and I were talking about how this is a new chapter for us in our career. We've been playing together for more than 10 years, and we've been through many incarnations of what we are as a band. We feel like we've got a great team that's well-manned, that we're onto the next incarnation.

SCOTT AVETT: We're armed, and we're in the beginning stages of trying to wrap our heads around what we're capable of in the set. Logistically, there are two new additions: We played for the first time last night with someone on keys and someone on drums. There's a lot of rock-and-roll possibilities around the drum kit that haven't been as available to us in the past, so we're very much at the beginning of a section of our time together as a band where a lot of worlds are opening up. It'll take off some of the shackles of some of the songs we can't write. I think about us playing here in the past, and it feels very similar to me.

ESQ: Newport Folk is different from other festivals, in that it's got a legacy of some of the most legendary moments in American music history. Has that affected how you perform here?

SCOTT AVETT: I think we rarely think about that.

SETH AVETT: Anytime you start getting a real tangible relationship with something that's been blown up to a legendary status, you just realize that every part of it is just people getting ahead. If you go to the Village Vanguard, it's just a room — it's the people there that make it a special thing, that make the possibility for it to be something legendary. We think about what it's like right now while making connections with folks in the moment. That's the only way we can make sense of it. Not to diminish anything about a legend, but look at Dylan: Dylan went electric, and that's a story we all know. But for the man himself, he doesn't think about that show, probably — in his memory it's probably just another show. The personal relationships we have with shows, art, whatever, they are our own, and they become legendary because of our own perspective. Right now, I'm thinking of seeing the Foo Fighters in 1995 at the Ritz in Raleigh. To me, that's on par with Dylan going electric.